Skaz (Russian:сказ,IPA:[ˈskas]) is a Russian oral form of narrative. The word comes fromskazátʹ, "to tell", and is also related to such words asrasskaz, "short story" andskazka, "fairy tale".[1] The speech makes use of dialect and slang in order to take on the persona of a particularcharacter.[2] The peculiar speech, however, is integrated into the surrounding narrative, and not presented inquotation marks.[3] Skaz is not only aliterary device, but is also used as an element in Russian monologue comedy.[4]
Skaz was first described by the RussianformalistBoris Eikhenbaum in the late 1910s. In a couple of articles published at the time, Eikhenbaum described the phenomenon as a form of unmediated or improvisational speech.[5] He applied it specifically toNikolai Gogol's short storyThe Overcoat, in a 1919 essay titledHow Gogol's "Overcoat" Is Made.[1] Eikhenbaum saw skaz as central to Russian culture, and believed that a national literature could not develop without a strong attachment to oral traditions.[4] Among the literary critics who elaborated on this theory in the 1920s wereYury Tynyanov,Viktor Vinogradov, andMikhail Bakhtin.[5] The latter insists on the importance of skaz in stylization,[6] and distinguishes between skaz as a simple form of objectified discourse (as found inTurgenev or Leskov), and double-voiced skaz, where an author's parodistic intention is evident (as found in Gogol or Dostoevsky).[7]
In the nineteenth century, the style was most prominently used byNikolai Leskov andPavel Melnikov, in addition to Gogol. Twentieth-century practitioners includeMikhail Bulgakov,Aleksey Remizov,Mikhail Zoshchenko,Andrei Platonov, andIsaac Babel.[1] The term is also used to describe elements in the literature of other countries; in recent times it has been popularised by theBritish author and literary criticDavid Lodge.[8]John Mullan, a professor of English atUniversity College London, finds examples of skaz inJ. D. Salinger'sThe Catcher in the Rye andDBC Pierre'sVernon God Little.[9]
